


Toy Soldiers

by EliotRosewater



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Children's Stories, F/M, Family, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Relationships, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:42:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28020360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EliotRosewater/pseuds/EliotRosewater
Summary: Tony gave Bucky a new arm, Natasha told a story, and Steve kept his fat mouth shut.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 8
Kudos: 33





	Toy Soldiers

**Author's Note:**

> Work was originally posted 30 October 2016 and removed in August 2017. This re-post has had minor revisions.

They should have brought a blanket. Steve watched Bucky try not to tremble on the chair. It'd been hours but the shakes hadn't stopped. Steve knew this shaking wasn't because of cold, but still. Blankets were comforting.

The chair reclined one hundred and eighty degrees. Bucky had insisted that it already be reclined before he sat on it. So they had. Tony was looking at Bucky with annoyed expectancy. Steve wanted to put a hand on Bucky's shoulder to let him know that it was alright. A useless thing to say, but it seemed like an important gesture.

"I'm sorry," Tony said, "I thought we were getting this done today."

"Tony," Natasha said. A warning in her voice. She was behind Tony with her arms crossed, leaning on a tray of instruments.

The reclined chair and Bucky separated the room into _Nat and Tony_ and _Steve_. He had to remember that it wasn't _versus_. But Tony's comments got Bucky moving. He peeled the blanket off his left shoulder with his right hand. The motion was slow, stalling, but it was over too soon for Bucky. His hacked up shoulder was exposed. The scars where metal sunk below flesh never ceased to make Steve's insides tighten.

Steve wanted to see Tony's reaction to this. He wanted to see what the billionaire would do when faced with the mutilation he'd done. Too bad: Tony's face didn't give anything away.

Bucky lay back holding the blanket around his chest as best as he could manage. An instinct told Steve to help, but he didn't act on it. Steve, Tony, and Natasha watched Bucky take two deep breaths.

"OK," Bucky said.

"OK," Tony echoed. "Music."

And music started playing. It was loud and clanging. Steve's ears hurt within seconds. He didn't say anything. Instead, he watched Tony's every move. Natasha was doing the same thing, he noticed. Bucky wasn't. His eyes were closed. He was making a concentrated effort to be calm as Tony's gloved hands began poking around with what was left of the prosthesis.

An hour and a half of soldering bits and pieces in the stump, Bucky opened his eyes and said, "Stop."

It did. Everything stopped, even the music. Steve stepped forward and so did Natasha — it was the most she'd moved this whole time.

Bucky looked between both of them and said with his eyes on Steve, "I'm OK. Just need a minute." He turned to Tony and said, "Can I sit up?"

"Do whatever you want."

Bucky sat up. The blanket fell off his chest and pooled in his lap. With his right hand, Bucky rubbed at his sternum. His fingertips pressed deep into the flesh over his heart. This whole time the monitors hadn't reported anything out of the ordinary. Bucky's heart rate had hardly fluctuated. There was no indication of pain or distress.

Steve wanted _so badly_ to ask. But he kept his silence.

Bucky dropped his hand, lay back, and said, "OK."

Steve felt himself relax and tense in the same second. Natasha seemed to fall back into a more casual form of her already-casual posture. Tony told his AI to play the awful clanging music again and then he went back to the remains of the arm. It could have been any old project to him, Steve thought. Bucky was no more than another Iron Man suit to Tony. Another Dum-E. A part that needed reattaching. A machine that needed fixing. This was technical work to Tony, not surgery on a living, breathing, cognizant human being.

The music changed abruptly from what sounded like a baby banging on pots while screaming to something very dramatic.

"Don't touch my music," Tony said without so much as blinking, still engrossed in the parts.

Natasha was smirking. "Too late."

 _You can say that again_ , Steve thought.

Another forty minutes went by and then Tony said, "All done in there. We're ready to attach the new prosthesis."

"Already?"

Tony looked at Steve. It was uncomfortable. Tony shrugged. "Yep. But I gotta pee first."

He left and Bucky sat up. Steve watched him rub at the flesh around the implanted metal. He squeezed his ribs for a few seconds, pushed on his collarbone — if he even still had one. One made of bone. Steve waited until Bucky's hand fell away from his chest before he approached.

"Feeling OK?" he said.

Bucky nodded. "S'not so bad."

Natasha said from her place by the instruments, "Your body is handling it just fine."

Bucky shrugged. "Body's used to it." He pulled at the blanket with his hand and managed to drape it over his shoulders, careful of the new wires, tubes, and flexible cables dangling from him.

"Need anything?" Steve said. "Are you hungry? Thirsty?"

"Nah. I'm OK."

Which meant vomiting was a possibility.

Bucky picked at the blanket and added, "If anything's gonna get me, it's gonna be — . . . . Um, the attachment is probably going to be the toughest part."

That had been in the notes and the plans. They were all aware that the attachment would be the hardest part, physically. Steve was sure the entire idea of this surgery was hard for Bucky. But the attachment was what they worried about the most. Once the right wires were soldered or whatever, sensation would come back on-line. None of them knew how that was going to feel, and Bucky wasn't open to taking precautionary pain medication.

Natasha said, "Is there anything we can do to make it easier?"

Bucky smiled crookedly and said, "Punch me in the head?"

"I'll keep that in mind," Natasha said with a crooked smile of her own.

Steve was too busy worrying to read into it.

Tony came back too soon and the new arm was out on a table for them all to see. Bucky didn't look at it. In fact, he rolled his body in the opposite direction as much as he could without upsetting the fixtures and support blocks Tony had set his bionic side into. Steve felt his whole body tense as the attachment began. Thank God Natasha still had control of the music. All that noise Tony liked would have been a bridge too far for Steve.

As was always the case with their lives, after the third wire was attached, Bucky sucked in a breath through his teeth. The colour on the heart monitor screen went from green to yellow. Steve took a step forward, but he stopped himself.

Bucky muttered in Russian. That broke Tony's bubble of stony detachment. He paused to see if there'd be an outburst which required defensive measures.

Natasha stifled a laugh and said, "James."

"Hurry up and finish this," Bucky bit out.

"I thought you geriatric types were supposed to have manners," Tony said. Humour to cover his tracks as always.

Bucky made an odd noise, but Tony went back to wiring the arm.

"James," Natasha said again — Steve blinked and stared at her. She said, "Would you like a punch in the head?"

"Yes."

"I'm going to come over to you. Is that OK?"

Bucky kept his eyes closed tight and he nodded his head once, shortly. Maybe he was afraid that he'd start screaming if he let his mouth open.

Natasha stepped away from the place where'd she'd been this whole time and went around to the side of the chair that Bucky was facing. Steve watched Tony deliberately not watch Natasha.

She said to Bucky, "Do you want to hear a story?"

"Kay," he said while barely opening his lips.

Tony definitely flicked his eyes toward her then.

"Not so long ago," she began, "in a toy room not so far away, there was a little boy with blond hair and blue eyes."

"Name," Bucky said quickly.

Natasha looked up. "His name was Stevie," she said.

Steve had to look away when Natasha pinned him with that look on her face. Tony saw him look away.

Bucky made a sound in his throat.

"So Stevie had all these toys in his toy room," Natasha told Bucky. "He had everything. He had so many toys that he didn't know what to do with them. But he did have a favourite: the toy soldiers. Stevie had a bucket full of the little men, one hundred in total. He counted them every night before bed. Out of all one hundred of those soldiers, the one that Stevie liked the most was the one with the missing leg."

"Missing _leg_?" Bucky said. Steve would recognise the amusement in Bucky's voice anywhere. Any time.

(The desperation of something to cling to, that was unmistakable, too.)

"That's what I said," Natasha said. "The missing leg never stopped Stevie's favourite soldier from going on missions. He said that the soldier was more special than all the others because he was still out in the trenches fighting Beanie Babies even though he only had one leg. He did more on one leg than the other soldiers did on two.

"But at night, after Stevie's mom put him to bed safe and sound, the toys would come alive —"

"I'm sorry," said Tony. He abruptly stopped working and sat up with an army-straight spine. "Wouldn't it be easier if we just let the guy watch _Toy Story_?"

Natasha ignored him. She kept talking. "At night, the toys would come alive. And they were like a family. And they never fought because they were all united in their love for Stevie. The toys had friends and communities and jobs. When the toy soldiers were done drilling for the night — because it was their job to protect Stevie twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week — they'd go out and see their friends and families.

"The one-legged soldier always went to the theatre to see his friend, the ballerina, perform. Meeting up after the performance was the part of the day that both of them looked forward to most. They'd walk around Stevie's room at night and sit in the patch of moonlight coming in from the window. The soldier and the ballerina would watch the stars and they'd tell each other about their dreams and their lives and what they wanted, what they'd do after Stevie outgrew them."

Steve became suddenly hyper-aware of himself. He blinked a few times and looked around the room. Bucky's heart monitor was green again. Tony was still bent over the prosthesis but Steve could tell that the billionaire had an ear on what Natasha was saying.

She laughed a little and said, "The soldier and the ballerina were practical toys, though all the others called them stupid or oblivious. The only love they ever discussed was that which they had for Stevie. Practical is what they were. Stupid and oblivious…well, maybe they were a little bit of that, too. What it really came down to was that they were shy around each other."

A spark jumped between two bits of wire, one dangling from Bucky's shoulder and the other on the limp, barely-attached prosthesis. Tony made a strange noise that sounded choked. Steve saw Bucky's right hand ball into a tight fist under the blanket. A trapped moan of pain shivered in his throat.

"One day," Natasha said loudly, and she put a hand on Bucky's cheek to recapture his focus, "Stevie assigned the one-legged soldier to watch duty. There were rumours that the enemy would try to move under cover of the storm Stevie's mother had told him would be happening that afternoon, and Stevie wanted his best man to have his ear to the ground. Well, a few hours into the watch, the soldier realised that the rumours were true. There was a lot of wind and water and thunder. There were enemies coming to get Stevie.

"It was the soldier's job to protect Stevie at all costs, and the soldier loved Stevie anyway; he'd save the boy even if it wasn't his job. So the soldier defended Stevie's bedroom window. But as he was fighting, the wind picked up at just the wrong time. It knocked the soldier off the windowsill and down to the grass outside. The enemy took the soldier because they thought they could interrogate him and figure out how to gain entry to Stevie's bedroom."

It was a good thing there was no heart rate monitor connected to Steve just then. The sort of lights and sounds it would be making . . . Steve caught Tony glancing up at him. They locked eyes for less than a second and then looked away. In the reclined chair, Bucky had opened his eyes and was watching Natasha. The expression on his face was so _open_. It was the opposite of how Steve was feeling. And the way her hand had moved from Bucky's cheek to the crook of his elbow . . . _this_ touch wasn't one meant to hold someone's attention.

"The soldier wasn't _that_ stupid," Natasha said, "and, when the enemy took him back to their base, he refused to answer their questions. The enemy got tired of the soldier's smart-ass answers to all their questions and all of his escape attempts after just one day. So they thought about it, and they decided they could convince the soldier that Stevie didn't want him anymore. After all, what good was a soldier with one leg to someone like Stevie?

"The next day, the enemy came to give a forged letter to the soldier from Stevie, but they had made a mistake. They hadn't properly restrained the soldier because they thought he was weak with his missing leg. He'd broken his bonds, and he fought off his guards in the night, escaping their camp. He had to get back to Stevie — and he was starting to miss the ballerina, too."

"You're _sure_ you wouldn't rather watch _Toy Story_?" Tony said. His instruments were put down on a wheeled tray. Leaning over the work-in-progress, he raised his eyebrows at Natasha. "Maybe a little bit of _Toy Story 2_?" Tony made the face he always made when pretending to think about something he'd already come to a conclusion about. "And _Toy Story 3_? Wait — you're not spoiling _Toy Story 4_ right now, are you?"

The number on Bucky's heart rate monitor ticked upward, but it stayed in the green.

Natasha pinned Tony with a gaze until he looked away, bowing under the weight of her. Steve knew the feeling. It didn't escape his notice the way Bucky's arm shifted under Natasha's hand. Steve and Tony made uncomfortable eye contact again.

"Anyway," Natasha said, eyes turned back to Bucky, "the soldier had to find his way back to Stevie, but he didn't know where the enemy had taken him. It was raining again. It had been happening all day, and the soldier got swept away in some water rushing down a ground gutter. It dumped him down a grate. There he fought rats and worms and an alligator until the grate dumped him into the sea. A fish grabbed the soldier when he made it to the sea, but then a pelican grabbed the fish."

"Oh, so it's _Finding Nemo_ now," Tony said. But he kept working that time and deliberately didn't look up. Steve _knew_ it was deliberate.

"The soldier knew he couldn't give up now. He had to keep fighting. Stevie counted the soldiers every night; he knew that the one-legged soldier was missing by now. Surely Stevie was missing the soldier as much as the soldier was missing Stevie. So the soldier freed himself from the fish and then forced the pelican to spit out everything in its mouth. And as luck would have it, the soldier fell from the sky and landed right outside Stevie's window. Even luckier was the fact that the tin robot was on watch and saw the whole thing."

"I was wondering when my character was going to put in an appearance," Tony mumbled.

Lucky Tony didn't look up because Natasha had thrown him another one of her cutting glances.

"The tin robot swooped down and brought the soldier back inside. All the toys cheered when they saw that the soldier was back. They hugged him and clapped him on the back. Seeing Stevie so sad without the one-legged soldier had made all of them sad, too. They were happy to watch Stevie smile again when he saw that the one-legged soldier was back."

Bucky closed his eyes slowly. It was only by virtue of his enhanced hearing that Steve heard him say, "What about the ballerina?"

That was when Steve noticed Bucky's hand hanging out of the edge of the blanket, fingertips just barely tangled with Natasha's. When had it happened?

Softness hovered on the edges of Natasha's eyes. She said, "Well, the soldier met the ballerina at the fireplace that night. He was drying out and warming himself back up beside the flames after his adventure. Now that they were together again, they realised how much they'd missed each other. They sat side by side, the ballerina's pointe shoes beside the soldier's boots. They were so happy to be together again that they talked all night. It wasn't until the fire burned out that they noticed how close they'd been sitting to the flames; their bases had been melted together. They were together forever."

Natasha's free hand was in Bucky's hair. Steve looked at his own hands because bad things would happen if he kept watching the two of them. Tony was doing the same.

"So this kid named Stevie had all these toys that he loved and played with. Among all those toys were a soldier with a missing leg and a ballerina who were stuck together at the base. All the toys were good friends, and they all were united in their love for Stevie. And even though Stevie needed a lot of looking after, they lived happily ever after."

Eyelids fluttering, Bucky looked at Natasha. Steve wouldn't have thought it was possible: he couldn't tell what the look on Bucky's face meant.

Tony interrupted the silence, which was expected (and Steve was grateful for it). "I'm going to start the calibration test on the biceps section."

Without shifting his gaze from Natasha, Bucky said, "Calibration. Yeah. OK."

Steve was going to need some time to calibrate, too. All he knew for certain right now was that he didn't want to interrupt whatever was happening here.

**Author's Note:**

> The story Nat told is an altered version of Hanson's song "Soldier," which is, of course, a retelling of The Steadfast Tin Soldier. 
> 
> (Yes, _that_ Hanson.)


End file.
